It's been a while since my last post. Not because I didn't feel like or because I wasn't doing stuff.
On the contrary.
When I finished my 54mm knight Owain Glyndwr (see my last blog post), my eyes fell on a plastic tupperware container which had been languishing in the remote corners of the war chest for years and years on end. Inside the container was a 90mm metal model of a mounted samurai general which I had built in my late teens or early twenties and in time bits and pieces started coming off. Luckily, though, I saved all of them and having given up of any immediate repair, I stored the lot in the container and left them there, all forgotten.
So six months ago I opened the container for the first time in decades, checked that all the pieces were, indeed present and set to work on restoration. I have to say at this point that this model is one of a series of samurai models from Poste Militaire. These were all the rage in the eighties and today are looked upon as classics. This one is a sculpt of samurai general Kato Kiyomasa - apparently more renowned for his prowess of hunting tigers than for his generalship - by Ray Lamb. I don't think these eighties' models are up to the standard of today's sculpts but they are still very nice and imposing pieces. One thing I had noticed in the past was that the horse's hind leg had buckled under the weight of the metal (the whole thing with base weighs in at just shy of 1.2kg) so one of the first things I knew I had to do was to reinforce the legs with brass rods drilled as far up the legs as possible. The whole thing was stripped down to bare metal and rebuilt from the ground up. This is the result.
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| This is what I had muddled through forty years ago. Poor Kato ! |
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| All stripped down |
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| Had to reinforce the legs or they would have buckled once more |
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| I thought of putting a roadside lantern on the base so I scratch built one |
This project was a marathon during which I met quite a few hurdles but which I thankfully managed to overcome. I hope you like the end result and thank you all for visiting and commenting.
Hope not to take so long before my next post!
Mike